I wanted to build a sample-player (“soundboard”) and decided to use Mixxx because it has all the necessary features that I was looking for (open source, runs on a Raspberry, highly customizable, …).

My target scenario for this installation is to use it together with a Midi-controller and the official 7″ touchscreen for Raspberry Pi. While Mixxx comes with a set of skins (i.e. user interfaces) with focus on different aspects all of them have in common that they are providing all the functionalities for DJ’ing: 2 or 4 decks for playing tracks, crossfader, mixer-section, library, etc. Many of these things can be hidden from the screen but even then there are still too many things left visible consuming precious real-screen-estate.

While every skin provides the functionality to hide the mixer section or the sampler there is (technically) no way to completely hide the decks via temporary selection. They seem to be seen as an integral part of every Mixxx-skin. That made it necessary to do some serious work on this. Since building a skin from scratch was completely out of reach I took the skin “Deere (64 Samplers)” as a starting point and worked my way up from there.

For an upcoming holiday with a few of my friends I needed a Midi-controllable software which allows me to play different audio-samples – some might call this a ‘soundboard’. On top of my wishlist were things like

-open source

-runs on Linux (Raspberry)

-fully customizable

Fortunately, before starting a new project myself I came across Mixxx. It’s an open source DJ-Software with a completely customizable user-interface that also includes a multi-cell sample-player. Mixxx version 1.10 is readily available for various platforms (“sudo apt-gt install mixxx” on a Raspberry PI) but has been superseded by version 2.1.1 (as time of writing). There are no precompiled binaries for Mixxx 2.1 on a Raspberry PI yet so the first step was to build a version myself. The necessary steps are documented in Mixxx’s own Wiki but it’s partially outdated and not everything is located in one place.

Use this to add songs to the Volumio queue without playing them instantly.

As you might have derived from the last posts I have become a fan of Volumio recently. However, one thing that I thought was implemented incorrectly (from my very very personal point of view) is how tracks are handled when they are added to the playing queue.

The image shows the results of the search for a track. Volumio is running on a Raspberry PI somewhere in my home network. The user interface is accessed with the browser of my current mobile phone. Clicking a track in the list of results will add that track to the active queue (which is good) AND will instantly play it regardless of what’s been playing at that moment (which is bad – insanely bad).